It is a time of fear in the face of freedom, a time of an emptying country and swelling cities, a time for the widening of previous roads and the opening of new paths, yet a time when these paths are mined by knowing algorithms of the all-seeing eye. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection. These are the times when maps fade, old landmarks crumble and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread. Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.

The Restore the Fourth movement against massive warrantless seizure of papers and effects by the U.S. Government reports significant success in pulling Americans’ attention back to the NSA PRISM scandal with its nationwide day of protest:

Your protests this week brought major local, national, and international media attention to our movement and, more importantly, to the issue of the Fourth Amendment and the unconstitutional surveillance that violates it.

According to analytics ordered for us by Reddit GM Erik Martin, Restore the Fourth was referenced eight times Thurdsay on major national TV and radio stations (Bloomberg Radio, The Call, CNBC World, CNN, CNN International, and Fox News; and NPR twice) and 259 times on local TV and radio stations.

The print and online publications that ran one or more articles on us include BBC, The Boston Globe, CBC, CBS, CNet, CNN, Fox News, The Gazette, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, International Business Times, LA Times, Mashable, Politico, Reuters, Time, The Times of India, RT, SF Gate, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Yahoo News, and Wikinews….

According to Google Trends, by late June news and search traffic for [the term] “Fourth Amendment” had declined to less than 20% of what it had been when the NSA/PRISM scandal first broke, but shot up to more than 80% on the 4th, most likely largely because of our protests.

What all this means is that we succeeded, at least temporarily, in preventing the media cycle and the attention of the American people from moving away from the Fourth Amendment and the violations of it that were revealed a month ago. This is a critical first step, because the country’s citizens can’t take action to stop a scandal they’ve forgotten about, and we have established our movement with a cultural presence and larger base of support that we can build off of. We’ve made real progress, and that’s something all of our participants should be really excited about, and proud of.

So what’s coming next? The Restore the Fourth movement is considering a number of different ideas, including:

– Planning, coordinating, and promoting future nationwide protests like those on July 4th.

– Exploring more local spheres of influence such as town hall meetings.

– Political lobbying in defense of the 4th Amendment.

– Legal action in defense of the 4th Amendment.

But in order to accomplish these goals, the Restore the Fourth movement needs resources, and is trying to raise $10,000 by the end of today. This strikes us as an entirely worthy cause, and so Irregular Times has chipped using funds we accumulate from sweatshop-free shirt sales. If you believe in a strong, persistent social movement to fight a warrantless surveillance state, won’t you make a donation, too?

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